Morvern Callar

It is off-season in a remote Highland sea port: twenty-one-year-old Morvern Callar, a low-paid employee in the local supermarket, wakes one morning to find her strange boyfriend has committed suicide and is dead on their kitchen floor. Morvern's laconic reaction is both intriguing and immoral.

I re-read this strange and lonely novel this year after finding it when moving house. I read and loved it when it first came out nearly 30 years ago and I’m so glad I gave it another go around.
It’s a first person story set in a small town next to the ocean in the Scottish highlands with all the dialogue in Scotts (readable for any English speaker though). Morvern lives in this small, desolate town with her boyfriend, who she one day wakes up to discover has killed himself in their bathroom. Her reaction is not one of hysteria or emotion but of quiet, calm detachment. From this first page of the book you quickly understand that Morven is an utterly odd and inscrutable human. Her inner world is shown fully here but you never feel that you know her or understand her motivations. She is utterly detached both from the world and herself and I found myself glued to even the most mundane details of her life trying to get clues as to who she really is. Morvern is a true, badly-behaved anti heroine, with absolutely zero of the redeeming features we normally ask of difficult female characters and is therefore an important and impressive creation. I love this strange book & I wish everyone would read it! read more